How the drug war has turned modern philosophy into pseudoscience
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
March 16, 2024
I have already explained in many essays how today's psychology reckons without the Drug War1. It ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously and so ends up disastrously shunting the depressed and anxious off onto dependence-causing Big Pharma meds while dogmatically ignoring the obvious powers of a long list of drugs to elate and inspire. This mindset also helps justify the use of shock therapy for the severely depressed when such victims could have otherwise been cheered up in real-time with drugs like MDMA, coca, and even opium - the nightly smoking of which is surely preferable to having one's brain fried2! Yet drug researchers like Robert Glatter profess to be uncertain whether even laughing gas could actually help the depressed3.
Could laughing gas help me, Robert? You're kidding me, right?
Such obfuscating materialists do not even dare to ask if the daily chewing of the coca leaf could help chronic depressives like myself4. It is more than their jobs are worth for them to ask such questions. For academics today are under the thumb of the Drug Warrior and know better than to promote treatments that use demonized substances, which the Drug Warrior insists can have no positive uses for anybody, anywhere, ever. To insist otherwise is to kiss your research funding goodbye.
To repeat, then, modern psychology reckons without the Drug War and this has had disastrous results. I know this all too well, as this oversight has helped to justify draconian drug laws that have deprived me for a lifetime now of the godsend mood medicine that grows at my very feet.
And yet philosophy does the exact same thing. Modern philosophy also reckons without the Drug War. It too ignores the insights that would be gained by taking drug effects seriously.
Consider the conclusion of Immanuel Kant, that we can know nothing about the noumenal world, about "what is really out there," and that we have but one shared experience of the sensible world as mediated through the categories of thought5. Well, guess what? William James himself begged to differ. Under the influence of nitrous oxide, he came to the conclusion that our everyday "sober" consciousness which Kant is presupposing here "is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.6" James concluded, moreover, that "No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.7"
Yet disregard them we must, thanks to Drug War prohibition. We must hand the laurels in this philosophical contest to Immanuel Kant because William James has been disqualified from even running in this race. Kant is right because the government says so. And are our philosophers pushing back against this prima facie censorship, especially now that the FDA has nitrous oxide in its sights as a drug to be demonized, the substance that inspired James's visions in the first place? Are they up in arms, petitioning the FDA on behalf of the freedom of inquiry and human progress in general?
To the contrary, most philosophers today seem to think that drug use can have nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. In fact, the Harvard website does not even mention laughing gas in their biography of William James, the founder of their school of psychology and the first man in America to teach a course on that subject8. They have expunged James's "drug use" from history, just as most books about Benjamin Franklin refrain from telling the reader about his penchant for opium. In the age of the Drug War, even our facts about the past must conform to Drug War orthodoxy, namely, the idea that psychoactive drug use can have no benefits for anybody, anywhere, ever.
This oversight is becoming increasingly inexcusable, however, as researchers involved in the psychedelic renaissance continue to remove the many layers of stigma that the racist Drug Warrior has strategically attached to psychoactive drug use over the last 100-plus years of substance demonization. But neither psychologist nor philosopher have yet to awaken from their "dogmatic slumbers." In fact, I have written on this subject to hundreds of American philosophers (real snail mail) over the last five years and never heard back from one of them9. Not one of them. I wrote to all the philosophers at Oxford about the UK's attempts to outlaw laughing gas, urging them to oppose the measure as an attack on academic inquiry, and no one responded10. Not one of them.
This is why I have concluded that the world is going through a new self-imposed Dark Ages, one in which science has willingly devolved into pseudoscience in order to conform to the requirements of racist Drug Warriors, who insist that drug use must always be thought of as a meaningless dead end.
Author's Follow-up: December 11, 2024
A note about the Inca use of the coca plant. It is true that coca candies and teas (etc.) are readily available for tourists in Peru; however, that does not mean you will actually have the Inca experience when consuming the same. The Inca -- and their descendants to this very day -- chew the leaf in large bunches and continuously, thereby extracting the invigorating alkaloids from the leaf, an effect that can at best be suggested or hinted at by candy chewing and the like.
Author's Follow-up: December 20, 2024
There are very few Americans who recognize that they have been brainwashed from childhood when it comes to "drugs." They have been taught to feel a certain way about them and to not ask any pesky questions. To paraphrase William Shirer in his book about Hitler:
"No one who has not lived for years in a DRUG WAR SOCIETY can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.
The media called out Trump for fearmongering about immigrants, but the media engages in fearmongering when it comes to drugs. The latest TV plot line: "white teenage girl forced to use fentanyl!" America loves to feel morally superior about "drugs."
Champions of indigenous medicines claim that their medicines are not "drugs." But they miss the bigger point: that there are NO drugs in the sense that drug warriors use that term. There are no drugs that have no positive uses whatsoever.
Just saw a prosecutor gloating about the drug dealers she has taken down. What a joke. How much is she getting paid to play whack-a-mole? RE-LEGALIZE MIND AND MOOD MEDICINE!
Wonder how America got to the point where we let the Executive Branch arrest judges? Look no further than the Drug War, which, since the 1970s, has demonized Constitutional protections as impediments to justice.
That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.
I looked up the company: it's all about the damn stock market and money. The FDA outlaws LSD until we remove all the euphoria and the visions. That's ideology, not science. Just relegalize drugs and stop telling me how much ecstasy and insight I can have in my life!!
The DEA outlawed MDMA in 1985, thereby depriving soldiers of a godsend treatment for PTSD. Apparently, the DEA staff slept well at night in the early 2000s as American soldiers were having their lives destroyed by IEDs.
Everyone's biggest concern is the economy? Is nobody concerned that Trump has promised to pardon insurrectionists and get revenge on critics? Is no one concerned that Trump taught Americans to doubt democracy by questioning our election fairness before one single vote was cast?
Someone needs to create a group called Drug Warriors Anonymous, a place where Americans can go to discuss their right to mind and mood medicine and to discuss the many ways in which our society trashes godsend medicines.
People are talking about re-scheduling psilocybin, but they miss the point. We need to DE-schedule everything. It's anti-scientific to conclude in advance that any drug has no uses -- and it's a lie too, of course. End drug scheduling altogether! It's childish and wrong.